Getting more out of Revit MEP 3D Views

When you are working in the MEP disciplined views in Revit, the filtering of the view will make the architectural and structural elements half toned and transparent, which in some instances makes some of the other modelled elements look out of place. See below sectioned floorplan.

A way of getting around this is to use some of the view enhancing features in Revit and make the model a bit more legible.

There is no set order to do this but the 1st step we’ll look at now is to set the discipline of the view to ‘Coordination’. This will remove the discipline filtering and restore the original, colour & material visibility etc. you will no longer however, be able to see through the building fabric (see below).

The next step now is to restore some transparency using ‘Visibility Graphics’. We only want to apply transparency to the non MEP categories so the first thing to do is to filter them out of the selection.

Next we can click ‘All’ to highlight all of the remaining categories, we will however have to de-select the MEP categories which are also in Architecture (Electrical Equipment, Electrical Fixtures, Lighting Fixtures, Mechanical Equipment & Plumbing Fixtures), otherwise they will end up transparent too.

Once the selection is complete, click in the ‘Transparency’ column of one the selected categories and set it to the required value, in this case 80%. Also you may want to halftone the line work of these categories which can be applied with a tick in the box to the right.

Once this is done you should now be able to see all of the services displayed again but with the added benefit of being able to see walls, ceilings etc. Realistic visual style will also give you the below affect. With a bit more time spent on the transparencies, you can improve it further.

I hope this has been useful. Check out our website for future blog posts and also the Graitec Advance PowerPack for Autodesk Revit, for a number of additional tools including batch export to DWG and link to excel.